Cordelier-Delanoue--A sitting of the Athénée--M. Villenave--His
family--The one hundred and thirty-two Nantais--Cathelineau--The hunt
_aux bleus_--Forest--A chapter of history--Sauveur--The Royalist
Committee--Souchu--The miraculous tomb--Carrier
During the period of the first representations of the English
actors (which coincided with my evening attendance at the offices
of the Secretariat) I made the acquaintance of a young fellow named
Cordelier-Delanoue. It came about very naturally. We were publishing
_Psyché_ at that time and Delanoue had sent us a poem which he called
_Hamlet_; this we inserted in our journal, he came to thank us and
Adolphe and I became friendly with him, I especially. Delanoue was the
son of one of the generals of the Revolution, who had formerly known my
father; this circumstance had drawn us together and our dramatic and
political sympathies did the rest. One night Delanoue came to see me
at the office and suggested taking me to the Athénée while the courier
from the Palais-Royal went to Neuilly and back. I was ignorant about
many things, so it will not be any cause for astonishment, I hope, if
I admit that I had never heard of the Athénée. M. Villenave was giving
a literary soirée there that evening. I did not know who M. Villenave
was; and my ignorance in this respect was a little more excusable than
my not knowing what the Athénée was. However, I accepted. At that time,
I had not the horror of making fresh acquaintances which beset me
later. I was promised something connected with literature and literary
people, and a promise such as this would have urged me on to cross the
razor edge which serves as a bridge between the Mohammadan Paradise
and this earth. I could cross such an edge now, prone though I am to
giddiness, but it would be in order to fly from the very thing I then
went to seek. So far as I can recollect, the meetings of the Athénée
were held in a lower hall of the Palais-Royal, which had its entrance
from the rue de Valois. They discussed all sorts of topics that would
have been insufferable in drawing-rooms, but which at the Athénée were
simply tedious. The people who discussed these tedious subjects had the
right to a certain number of tickets to distribute among the members of
their families, their friends and their acquaintances. They could have
discussed these subjects quite well alone, but, for some inexplicable
reason, they preferred to have an audience. On this particular evening
the hall was full. M. Villenave was very popular in society, and,
besides, these meetings had a certain celebrity. If I were condemned
to be hung, I could not to save my life say what they talked of that
night. It was probably some treatise on a second-rate deceased author,
who served as an excuse to the writer to deliver a few raps to the
living. M. Villenave conducted the meeting: he addressed it standing,
by the aid of a couple of candelabras and a glass of _eau sucrée_ near
him. He was a fine-looking old man of, perhaps, at that time, some
sixty-six or sixty-eight years of age. He had splendid white hair,
daintily curled about his temples; black eyes that flashed with quite
Southern fire; he was very tall but stooped a little from much bending
over a desk; there was something distinguished-looking and graceful
in his movements and manners. I had stopped modestly by the door for
two reasons: first, because I was yet too unknown to imagine I had
the right to put the speaker himself or anybody else out for my sake;
secondly, as I had to return to my office by half-past nine, it was
more convenient to be near the door than elsewhere, in order to escape
incognito, as I had entered. Delanoue, who was more familiar with the
company than I, left me to go and joke with them, during the short
intervals when the sitting broke up to give M. Villenave time to take
breath.
The usual hour for the courier having come, I was quietly escaping to
return and receive him at my office, when Delanoue ran after me and
caught me up under the peristyle. He had been deputed by the Villenave
family to invite me to go and take tea with them at their house, after
the meeting. I owed this favour to the kind things my friend Delanoue
had said about me. I then had to inquire where the Villenaves lived.
No. 82 rue de Vaugirard. Oh! but 53 faubourg Saint-Denis was a fair
distance from my home. Fortunately, during my five years' residence in
Paris, I had learnt to know its streets pretty thoroughly, so I did
not feel obliged, as on my first visit, to hire a conveyance to take
me from the place du Palais-Royal to the rue des Vieux-Augustins. The
invitation conveyed by Delanoue had been so courteously and warmly
pressed that the least I could do was to accept it. I ran off to the
office, attended to the courier and returned. During the half-hour of
my absence the sitting had been concluded, and I returned to find M.
Villenave in a small drawing-room that opened out of the large hall,
receiving the congratulations of his friends. Delanoue introduced me to
M. Villenave and to his family. The Villenave family consisted first of
Madame Villenave, a very gracious little old lady, very intellectual
and an experienced society entertainer, but very fond of grumbling in
her home-life, for she suffered, like Anne of Austria, from a cancer
which ultimately killed her; Théodore Villenave, a tall, energetic
young fellow, an author, at that time, of various fugitive poems,
and translator of _Wallenstein_, which was destined to make a great
commotion behind the scenes of the Odéon for three or four years before
it was put on the stage, where it had a fairly successful reception;
Madame Mélanie Waldor, the wife of a captain in the infantry on service
and in garrison, who only put in short and rare appearances at Paris,
where those who knew him spoke of him as a brave and loyal soldier.
Madame Waldor composed fugitive verses, like her brother, which she
published in the daily paper; like her brother, too, she afterwards
wrote a play which had a successful run under the title of the _École
des Jeunes Filles._ Last came Élisa Waldor, who at that period was
only a charming little child with the head of a chérubin surrounded by
lovely golden curly hair; she afterwards grew into a tall, beautiful
woman, and was twice married--and happily each time, I trust.[1]
The family returned home on foot, in patriarchal fashion, accompanied
by five or six friends, who, like myself, were on their way to the
rue de Vaugirard, to take tea and nibble cake together there. As I
was the stranger, I was allotted the position of honour--namely, to
give my arm to Madame Waldor. As the distance was very long, it was
a good opportunity of becoming acquainted. But, as we had never seen
each other or spoken together before, the long walk would have been
embarrassing to us both, had not Delanoue joined us and made a third
in the conversation between the place du Palais-Royal and the rue de
Vaugirard. He thereby rendered us both a great service, for which both
of us were profoundly grateful to him.
What a strange thing these chance meetings are! How astonished I should
have been had anyone told me that this family, whose very existence I
had not known a couple of hours before, and who were complete strangers
to me, would become for the next two or three years almost as close to
me as my own, and that I should traverse the road that then seemed
to me so long between the rue du faubourg-Saint-Denis and the rue de
Vaugirard twice every day in future!
But I was in haste to reach our destination, to have a talk with M.
Villenave. I do not remember how it was, or on what occasion, but
a pamphlet he had written fell into my hands--a little work he had
published in 1794, entitled _Relation des noyades de cent trente-deux
Nantais_ (Story of the drowning of a hundred and thirty-two people of
Nantes). Directly I saw M. Villenave I remembered this pamphlet, and as
soon as I thought of the pamphlet I resolved to lead the conversation
to Carrier, and Nantes and the hundred and thirty-two Nantais. It
was not a difficult matter to set M. Villenave talking; only, his
conversation was very much like a sermon. When he talked, one had to
let him go on, not interrupt him, and listen to him with reverent
attention. He had, indeed, happened to be at Nantes in 1793, at the
same time as Jean-Baptiste Carrier, of bloody memory. God forbid we
should make the faintest excuses for that terrible proconsul and the
horrors he perpetrated! But it must be admitted that the Vendeans had
themselves set him an abominable example. Wars conducted by priests are
apt to be barbarous wars, and it is known--or rather, it is not known,
that at the beginning the insurrection was entirely in the hands of
priests; the nobles did not involve themselves in it until later, and,
when they did take part in it, the method of butchery became rather
more humane: it changed to shooting. The first person to play a part
in that bloody squabble was a sacristan named Cathelineau. Machiavelli
says that, "When it was decided to. assassinate Julian de Medicis in
the church of Sainte-Marie-des-Fleurs, they chose ecclesiastics to
do the work of assassination, because they were less likely to be
impressed by the sanctity of the place."
It is a strange but indisputable fact that when men of peace and love
and charity turn into executioners, they become the most refined in
cruelty of all; witness the _in-pace_ (dungeons) of convents, witness
the cells of the Inquisition, witness the massacres of Alby, witness
the auto-da-fés of Madrid, witness Joan of Arc, witness Urbain Grandier.
This Cathelineau was what the country people between Angers and
Saint-Laurent would term a sturdy lad (_gars_). Only three months
elapsed between the day of his first shot and the day when he was
killed, but these three months sufficed to make his name renowned in
history. He was neither tall, nor had he refined manners; he was but
five feet four inches high; but he had well-set shoulders and the hips
were splendidly poised, and he possessed the fine cool prudent courage
of the men of the West. We have mentioned that he was a sacristan, but
he was many other things beside; he was mason, carrier, linen-merchant,
a married man and the father of twelve or fourteen children. He had
hardly gained a hearing before he set up a superior council comprised
chiefly of priests: they troubled themselves but little over the
nobles. The head of this council was the famous Bernier, curé d'Angers.
Cathelineau was the man for him; the simple peasant discovered a
quicker method of starting an insurrection than the pope with his bulls
or the priests with their sermons. He advised the curés to shroud the
crucifixes in black crèpe and to carry them thus in their processions.
At the sight of their Christ in mourning, the peasants could no longer
contain themselves; women tore their hair, men beat their breasts and
all swore to kill the Republicans, root and branch, since they had
grieved the Saviour. It should be added that nothing could be less
knightly and less patriotic than the proclamations of these brave
folk:--
"Down with conscription! Down with the militia! Let us dwell
in our own countryside. People tell us the enemy may descend
on us and threaten our homes. Well and good, let them first
trespass on our soil, we shall be ready to meet them there!"
And those who talked thus were well aware that the enemy would have
devastated, pillaged and burned all France and demolished Paris before
it ventured between their hedges and among their furze bushes and in
their sunken pathways.
It was equivalent to saying, "What does it matter to us what may happen
to Alsace and Lorraine, Champagne and Burgundy, the Dauphiné and
Provence?... What does it matter to us if they extinguish Paris, the
light of the world?... Time enough to seize our guns when we see the
Cossack leap his horse over our hedges!"
Now the most picturesque of writers would find great difficulty in
giving a patriotic turn to such assertions as these. Personally, I
much prefer the volunteers who ran in front of the Prussians as far as
Valmy, to these peasants who waited quietly behind their hedgerows;
and all the more so since I am not at all convinced that they were
not really waiting for them on purpose to ally themselves to them.
Why should they not compound with the Prussians? they entered into
plenty of negotiations with the English! The war, then, began between
patriots and royalists, between citizens and peasants. There were
constitutional towns, manufacturing ones,--as, for example, Chollet,
where very beautiful handkerchiefs are made,--which contained numbers
of workpeople who did not wish for Prussians in France or for friends
of the Prussians. One day they heard that the people of Bressuire
had risen in revolt; they armed themselves with pikes and rushed off
to attack them. So the town of Chollet was especially marked out for
hatred by the peasants.
On 4 March, they attacked it in their turn. A commanding officer
belonging to the National Guard trusted himself among a group of
royalists; he went among them to endeavour to reconcile the two
parties; soon, cries of pain issued from this group, the members of
which had closed round him and were slashing at his legs with his own
sword.
On the 10th, came the turn of Machecoul; here, there was less to do
than at Chollet. Machecoul was a small town, exposed on every side
and easy to capture. They first learnt the danger they were in on a
Sunday; the tocsin was rung and all the peasantry of the surrounding
country made for the town. Two hundred patriots rallied and bravely
advanced against the assailants--two hundred against two thousand!--the
mass opened, surrounded the little band and made but one mouthful of
it. Machecoul had a constitutional curé, and the priests who had not
taken the oath to the constitution bore a grudge against those who had:
they protested that the latter "spoilt the profession"; they seized
the poor man as he came to say mass, and they killed him; but there
was a preconcerted plan among them to kill him by inches by blows
on the face. The torture lasted a long time: life is sometimes very
tenacious, especially in the hands of skilful executioners, who do not
incline to chase it too quickly out of the body. But everything has an
end: the curé died a martyr, and, when he was dead, they consulted an
old huntsman, a clever bugle blower, and organised a hunt, searching
from house to house to track down their quarry. When they unearthed a
patriot they blew the _vue_, at the sound of which every man, woman and
child ran out (in this kind of warfare, women and children are even
worse than men). When the patriot was beaten down, the _hallali_ was
bugled, then came the _curée_, which lasted a long time: it was carried
out, usually, by women, with the help of scissors and nails, and by
children, with the aid of stones. Machecoul lies on an eminence between
two departments; it was judged to be a good place for establishing a
court of justice; and they massacred there for forty-two days, from 10
March to 22 April.
The reader knows how the insurrection spread from the Lower Vendée to
the Higher. It was brought about by an affair at Saint-Florent: an
émigré had sent his servant, a Vendean named Forest into Vendée to
preach resistance, and opposition to the military system. They tried
to stop him, but he would not be denied a hearing; he openly preached
revolt in the streets. A gendarme came to him; he drew a pistol from
his pocket, fired at the gendarme and killed him. That pistol-shot woke
those who were yet slumbering, And, mark well, when this unlucky shot
was fired, the tocsin was already ringing in six hundred parishes;
then it was carried by the wind in all directions; nothing could be
heard but the ringing of bells, as though flocks of invisible birds
were flying over their brazen tongues. The vibration of those deadly
knells, which were answering one another from village to village,
grew in volume, clashing in the air, charging the atmosphere like a
thunderstorm, with electric currents of hatred and of revenge.
Meantime, what was Cathelineau, the prime mover of all this, busy
about? We will hear Michelet's version:--
"He had heard of the fight at Saint-Florent and the firing
of guns clearly enough; nor could he be unaware by the 12th
of the frightful massacre of the 10th, which had compromised
the Vendean coast in the revolt past all drawing back.
Even if he had not heard anything, the tocsin would have
roused him hard enough: the whole country seemed in an
uproar, the very earth trembled. He began to think things
were growing serious, and whether from the foresight of
the father of a family which he was shortly to leave, or
whether from military prudence, in the matter of laying
in stores of food, he began to heat his ovens and to make
bread. First came his nephew, with the story of the affray
at Saint-Florent. Cathelineau continued to knead his dough.
Then the neighbours began dropping in--a tailor, a weaver, a
shoemaker, a hatter.
"'Well, neighbour, what shall we do?'
"Quite twenty-seven of them had assembled there, bent on
following his counsel implicitly. He pointed out first
that a crisis had come: the leaven had done its work, the
fermentation was sufficiently advanced; it was time to stop
kneading, wipe his hands and shoulder his gun. Twenty-seven
went forth; at the end of the village they numbered five
hundred. It was the whole of the population, all worthy men,
sturdy, strong, steadfastly brave and honest, the very pick
of the Vendean armies, intrepid leaders almost always to be
found in the front ranks, facing the Republican cannon."
By the time they reached Chollet, they were fifteen thousand. They
had seized a piece of cannon at Jallais, which they christened the
_Missionnaire_; and a second, at some other place, which was dubbed
_Marie-Jeanne_. All along the route priests joined their ranks,
exhorting, preaching, singing mass to them. They started on the 12th,
as we have seen; after the 14th, a large band joined forces with them,
headed by a man who was to share the command with Cathelineau, and,
later, to succeed him. This was Stofflet, another rough but brave
peasant, a gamekeeper on M. Maulevrier's estate, whose grandson, poor
lad, the last descendant of the race, was killed out hunting, at the
age of sixteen. When the Vendean army reached Chollet it sent in a flag
of truce--a strange envoy he was, too, and he gives us a good idea of
the times, the place and the circumstances: his head and his feet were
bare; he carried in his hand a crucifix crowned with thorns, bound
round with a huge rosary; his eyes were lifted to heaven, as those of a
mystic or martyr, and he cried out between his sobs--
"Surrender, my dear friends, or you will all be put to fire and sword!"
This summons was made in the name of _commanding officer_ Stofflet and
_almoner_ Barbotin.
The whole of the garrison of Chollet comprised three hundred patriots
armed with muskets, and five hundred armed with pikes; they attempted
to offer resistance to fifteen thousand men; but, of course, resistance
was utterly impossible; M. de Beauveau, the head of the Republicans,
fell in the first attack. The patriots retired into a part of the
castle which commanded the square, and from whence they could fire
upon the Vendeans as they entered the square; this was all the easier
as there was a Calvary in the square before which every peasant knelt
and prayed, heedless of the firing, not returning to the fight until
his prayers were finished and the sign of the cross made. These good
folk--let us lay stress on the word and call them brave folk--for they
did not understand the enormity of the crimes they were committing,
since their priests had ordered them!--did not plunder, but they killed
not merely during battle, which was a necessity, but even afterwards,
and they killed cruelly, as we shall see.
We will again refer to Michelet for an account of how they killed; if
I related it to you in my own words you would say I was romancing. He,
it is known, did not lie; he was, indeed, driven from his chair because
he told the truth not only about the past but also about the future.
Michelet says:--
"Directly a prisoner was confessed, the peasants no longer
hesitated to kill him, as his spiritual salvation was made
secure; several escaped death by refusing confession, and
by saying that they were not yet in a state of grace; one
of them was spared because he was a Protestant and could
not confess. They were afraid to send him into damnation.
History has dealt very severely with the unfortunate
patriots who slaughtered the Vendeans; many of them
displayed heroic courage and died like martyrs. Those who
were cut into pieces could be counted by hundreds. I will
give one instance, among many, of a boy of sixteen who, over
the dead body of his father, shouted '_Vive la nation!_'
until he was pierced through by a score of bayonettes.
The most celebrated of these martyrs was Sauveur, a
municipal officer of Roche-Bernard, rather let us say of
Roche-Sauveur, for it should preserve his name. This town,
which is a thoroughfare between Nantes and Vannes, was
attacked on the 16th by an immense gathering of nearly
six thousand peasants; there were hardly any armed men in
the town and it was compelled to surrender. The maddened
crowd began at once by butchering twenty-two persons on
the square, on the pretext of a gun going off suddenly in
the air; they rushed upon the town hall and discovered the
_procureur syndic_, Sauveur, a fearless magistrate who had
stuck to his post. He was seized and dragged off; they put
him into a dungeon whence, next day, he was taken out to be
barbarously massacred. They sampled all kinds of weapons on
him, principally pistols: they fired at him with small shot,
trying to make him cry, '_Vive le roi!_' but he would only
shout, '_Vive la république!_' Infuriated, they fired at his
mouth with gunpowder and dragged him before the Calvary to
beg for mercy; he lifted his eyes to heaven in adoration,
but still he cried, '_Vive la nation!_' Next they shot his
left eye out and kicked him on a few paces; mangled and
bleeding, he stood with hands clasped looking upward.
"'Commend thy spirit to God!' yelled his assassins.
"They shot him down; he fell, but rose again, clasping
tightly his magisterial medal and still kissing it. Again
he was fired upon; he fell on one knee, dragged himself to
the edge of a trench with stoical calmness, without a single
groan or cry of anger or of despair! His fortitude drove the
frenzied mob to madness, for his only words were--
"'Finish me off, my friends,' and '_Vive la République!_ Do
not keep me lingering on, friends; '_Vive la nation!_'
"He made his confession of faith to the end, and they
silenced him with blows from the butt ends of their rifles!"
What do you think of that, you Royalist gentlemen? Surely the 2nd and
3rd of September could not show you anything better than that? Wait
a bit, this is not all; and what we are about to tell, be it clearly
understood, is not written for the purpose of reviving hatred, but to
make people detest civil warfare. If I once again borrow Michelet's
words, it is not only because they are more eloquent than mine, but so
that there may be two of us to cry "Shame!" Listen, and you will see
how true are his words:--
"One essential difference that we have noticed between the
violence of the revolutionist and that of the fanatic,
urged on by the fury of priests is, that the former, in
killing, desire nothing but to be rid of their enemy; the
latter, inspired with the feelings of ferocity of the
times of the Inquisition, have less desire to kill than to
cause suffering, to make the poor finite victim expiate in
infinite misery, in protracted agony, by way of avenging
God! To read the gentle idyllic accounts of Royalist
writers, one might think that these insurgents were saints;
that, in the main, they only exacted vengeance and entered
upon reprisals when forced thereto by the cruelties of
the Republicans. Let them tell us what were the reprisals
which caused the people of Pontivy, on the 12th or 13th of
March, led by a refractory curé, to murder seventeen of the
National Guard in the public square! Were they reprisals
which were exercised at Machecoul, for six weeks, under the
organised authority of the Royalist Committee? One Souchu,
a tax-gatherer, who presided, filled and emptied the town
prisons four times. The mob had, as we have seen, at first
killed from sheer sport out of brutal delight. Souchu put a
stop to that, and took care that the executions should be
long drawn-out and painful. As executioners, he specially
preferred children, because their clumsy hands caused more
protracted suffering. Seasoned men such as sailors and
soldiers could not witness these deeds without indignation,
and wanted to prevent them, so the Royalist Committee did
its murders by night: they did not shoot any longer, but
slaughtered their victims and then hastily covered up the
dying with earth. According to authentic reports made at the
Convention, 542 persons perished in one month and by what
ghastly deaths! When they could find practically no more men
to slay they proceeded to women. Many were Republicans and
not sufficiently complaisant to the priests who had a spite
against them. A frightful miracle took place: in one of the
churches there was a tomb of some noted saint or other; they
consulted it; a priest said mass over the tomb and laid
hands on it. Behold, the stone moved.
"'I can feel it rising up!' exclaimed the priest.
"And why did it rise up? To demand a sacrifice pleasing
to God, namely, that women should no longer be spared but
slaughtered! Happily, indeed, the Republicans, the National
Guard from Nantes, arrived.
"'Alas!' the townspeople said to them, coming to them
weeping and wringing their hands, 'you come too late! You
can but save the walls, the town itself is exterminated!...'
"And they pointed to the place where men had been buried
alive. Horrified, they beheld a shrivelled hand which in
the fearful anguish of suffocation had seized hold of and
twisted the withered grasses...."
Is it any good to speak about Carrier after all this? What would
it serve to tell of his _bateaux à Soupapes_;[2] of his _bagnades
républicaines_; of his _mariages révolutionnaires_ [men and women
bound hands and feet together and thrown into the Loire]; of his
_déportations verticales._[3] It would only be to set crime against
crime, which would prove nothing beyond the wickedness of man. Besides,
Carrier has atoned for his crimes. I am well aware that though this
may have been enough to satisfy the requirements of justice as far as
the man himself was concerned, it has not been sufficient to satisfy
history. It was in vain for Carrier to struggle with all his might and
main against the accusation, which came upon him like a shock; in vain
for him to exclaim, with sombre eyes, outstretched arms and strident
voice, to his old colleagues, now become his judges--
"I do not understand you! You must be mad! Why blame me to-day for
doing what you gave me orders to do yesterday? In accusing me, the
Convention accuses itself.... My condemnation, look to it, is your
condemnation also; you will find yourselves caught in the same
proscription with me: if I am guilty, so is every man here ... every
one, every one, every one! down to the very bell on the president's
table!"
But all his cries were useless. And herein lies the horror of
revolutions; they reach a pitch at which the same terror that
drove them into action drives them into reaction, and in which
the guillotine, sated with drinking the blood of the accused, is
callously and indifferently willing to drink the blood of judges and
executioners! This reaction, which set in two days later, saved the
lives of André Chénier and M. Villenave, together with a hundred and
thirty-one of the Nantais, his companions.
[Footnote 1: Alas! since these lines were penned death has intervened
in the life and happiness of this poor lady, for I read in the papers
one day at Brussels, in words as cold as the steel of the Middle Ages
which used to be placed in the hands of a skeleton:--
"Madame Bataillard, daughter of Madame Mélanie Waldor, has
just died after a long and painful illness. The funeral will
take place to-morrow. Any friends who may not have received
an invitation to be present are invited to attend at the
cemetery at eleven o'clock."
Unhappily, the notice came too late for me. Amongst all her many
friends I certainly held her in the most affectionate remembrance, and
I was denied the consolation either of seeing her before she died or of
following her to her grave. The merry child, the beautiful young girl,
the serious and intelligent wife, who should have died long after us,
since we saw her grow up, has gone before us, and we still wait here!]
[Footnote 2: TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.--Carrier compelled his victims to
embark on boats, which were then scuttled.]
[Footnote 3: TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.--See note 2.]